The Sky Below (19 page)

 

The cake was gorgeous. Red velvet with white icing, festooned with multicolored icing flowers, an extravagant set of red, molten sugar loops—
Happy 38th birthday, dear, dear Gabriel
—that began at the base of the cake, ran up the side, across the top, down the other side, and off the cardboard disk. It shone brightly in the crowded Chinese restaurant, excessive as a spaceship. Sarah's and Janos's faces beamed at me. From Sarah, a soapstone box filled with clock parts and foreign coins—art material. From Janos, a complete set of small, exquisite wood-carving knives that cleverly rolled up in a length of canvas,
with canvas handles stitched into the center. I kissed Sarah and Janos with loud smacks and cut them big fat pieces of rich red cake. Sarah laughed. “We're going to get high on this shit.”

Janos turned to her. “It's so nice to see you, my dear.” He patted her hand. “It's been too long. You look wonderful.” Which was a lie. She looked tired; her chin was pointier than ever. Subtly, he pulled his BlackBerry out of his pocket and glanced at it.

Sarah made a face. “
Mezzo mezz'.
I think I'm going to break up with my boyfriend.”

“What boyfriend?” I asked. “You don't have a boyfriend.”

She dropped her gaze to her slice of cake. “Sure I do. The puppetmaker.”

“The puppetmaker? He's your boyfriend? Janos, this cake is
amazing.
What are you talking about?”

Sarah ate a delicate bite. “It doesn't matter, because he's not my boyfriend anymore. I'm going to tell him tonight.”

Janos put the BlackBerry away and turned to give Sarah a keen look. “And why is that, may I ask? That you're breaking up with this man, this toymaker.”

“Well.” She considered, eating icing. “Okay, first, he's not a toymaker—he's an artist. His puppets were in the last Biennial. He's a serious guy, pretty much. He went to Brown. That's not the problem.” She sighed.

“So what is the problem?” asked Janos.

“He wants to marry me.” Her face crumpled, and I thought for a minute that she might cry, but then she regained her composure. “Like, married. This cake really is great. Where did you get it?”

I looked closely at her. Even after all this time, and all the baths, and the curling up to sleep in her drafty house behind the house, she could duck behind an inner door—the girl door, I called it privately—and out of my sight. Always, she seemed quite young to me when she did this, perhaps five, in
a white party dress, crying for a reason no one else would ever understand. Just now, for instance, all I could make out was the lacy edge of a white skirt. “Honey,” I said, “do you want to marry this guy?”

She shrugged miserably. “I would have to move to Vermont. He got a teaching job there.”

“What?” I nearly choked. “You can't do that.”

“Well.” She set her hand flat on the table. Her tone was flat, too. “That's what a lot of real artists do, Gabriel. They teach. He's lucky to get it.”

Janos, sitting back, said nothing. He ate his cake slowly.

“What do you mean, ‘real artists'?” I said.

“He's a real guy, Gabe,” said Sarah in a tone I didn't like, “with a real job. He was in the
Biennial.
”

“Screw the Biennial,” I said angrily. “Since when do you care about things like that? Everyone knows the Biennial is a fraud. Jesus, Sarah.” I was furious with her, but at the same time I was thinking with pride of my beneficent termites, who had intervened with time on my behalf. I cut myself another thick piece of birthday cake. “Okay, you know what? Fine. Throw away your own art. Marry the puppetmaker, move to Vermont, have ten kids, milk a cow or two, get fat and resentful, ruin the kids' lives with your bitterness. Good plan.”

Sarah, still eating icing, began to cry. “I'm the one who's bitter?” she said tearily.

“Gabriel,” said Janos. “Gabriel! Apologize.”

“No,” I said through a mouthful of red velvet cake. “We know each other too well for that. I mean, come on. She won't even say his name. How serious could this be?”

“Peter,” said Sarah. “Peter Priest.”

“Peter
Priest?
That's not a name. That's absurd. Peter Priest the puppetmaker? That's a joke.”

Sarah looked at me coldly, tear-stained. “It is, in fact, his name, Gabe. He didn't choose it.”

“Gabriel,” warned Janos again. He gestured for the check. “What in God's name is wrong with you? Are you having a stroke?”

Sarah tapped her fork against her plate. “No, really, this is helpful.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “You being such a total fucking asshole makes me see it: I don't want to break up with him at all. I like Peter Priest. I like him a lot. He's incredibly gentle.”

Burrowing into my bad behavior like a hungry termite, I snapped, “So you're going to be Mrs. Priest? Is that where this is going?”

Sarah stood up. She looked tall and pale and thin; her topiary hair, scattered over her shoulders, was regal. Her high forehead was flushed. Almost against my will, I knew why Peter wanted to marry her. There was something in her that burned clean.

“I really don't know,” Sarah said. “And screw you.” She kissed Janos, squeezed his hand, nodded at me. “I'll call you tomorrow,” she said to me, “and you can apologize. At length.” She left the restaurant.

I stared straight ahead, thinking of my termites. I counted them, began naming them.

Janos set a small pile of bills on the check, weighted them down with a little glass pitcher of soy sauce. He boxed up the remainder of the glorious cake. He rolled up the canvas with the exquisite woodcarving knives tucked inside. He gathered the watch parts and foreign coins from the pink tablecloth and put them into the soapstone box. He stacked it all in front of himself like a man waiting with his suitcases for a train, but he didn't move to go. He checked his BlackBerry again, glanced at me, glanced away.

I was embarrassed, of course. But something was tearing inside me, as if my ribs were pulling away from my lungs, as if my shoulder blades were broadening, stretching, cracking. I
didn't feel right. I couldn't explain what was happening to me. I didn't know why I hadn't told Sarah about the house: my first big secret from her. This Peter was her first big secret from me, apparently. Unless there were others. I felt slightly queasy, and stupid, and stubborn, and obscurely wronged, though I was, by any measure, the asshole at the table.

Janos said, “When I was your age, I had already been poor and rich and poor again and I was scratching my way back up. I wonder sometimes if this is an American thing, this drift. This
attachment
to drifting. I don't understand it.”

“I'm not drifting.” I wondered if I was going to throw up. My breath shortened, strained. My teeth hurt. “I have a plan.”

“Gabriel.” In profile, Janos's craggy face was leonine. His cufflinks were thick, plain gold bars. “Gabriel, my dear. Buying a house you can't afford is not a plan.”

“I think something's wrong with me,” I said. How much cake had I eaten?

“No,” said Janos. “It's just life. It pulls quite hard.”

But he was wrong. It wasn't life, or not usual life, anyway. It was the change. It was on its way, moving toward me, already lifting me. I thought it was the glowing windows of the house pulling me toward them across the river, and I rowed as hard as I could toward that light.

 

On a gray, freezing Thursday during which nothing was happening at
The Hudson Times
and my section was tidy as a freshly mowed lawn, the dead docile in their boxes of type, I got a tense call from Sarah. Could I come right now. Please.

I arrived at the crooked house behind the house to find Sarah sitting in her living room on her makeshift sofa. The fur had slipped down to reveal the black cotton futon beneath it. Sarah was biting a nail, looking as beautiful and undecided as I had ever seen her. There was a smudge over her right eyebrow. The floor was covered in boxes, some closed, taped, and
labeled, others with clothes or shoes or pans sticking out of the tops. The curtains had been taken down and were lying in a crimson heap on the floor. The unfiltered light was brighter than usual. There was a pronounced draft. The room felt shaken molecularly, as if a rhino or a hippopotamus had just galloped through it and away, out the back door. Sarah wore a gold band on her left ring finger. Her brown eyes were wide. She was wearing jeans and a plain blue thermal shirt and a long indigo scarf around her hair, as if she was an ordinary woman in an ordinary old house with water-stained walls where the air was already going flat.

I sat down next to her and she nestled against me. Her familiar scent. “Where are you going, honey?” I said. I thought she must have found another, cheaper apartment. Or, I tried to think that I thought that.

“Vermont. I married the puppetmaker.”

I nodded slowly. “Okay.”

“The moving van's coming soon.” She put her head on my shoulder.

“You should finish packing.”

“Yeah.”

The makeshift sofa was soft. The heat banged in the pipes against the cold. For an instant, I thought that maybe if I fucked her, I could get her to stay. But no part of the rest of me was interested in that. I was her brother, at best, chaste and melancholy, with pale, midwinter hands. I pulled her against me and I could feel her, her quivering. I didn't forgive her. I went upstairs to pee. The windowsills in the bathroom were empty, with grimy patches. The tub was scrubbed clean and white.

Then we sat side by side on the sofa. I tapped her new, hard gold ring with my finger. It was the plainest of bands, blank and simple against my fingertip. “Wow. Very real.”

“Yes,” she said. “You'll like him. He's just a person. He has a beard, sort of.”

“I didn't get into the show,” I said.

“Me neither.” Sarah rubbed her eyes. Then she got up as close as she could to my ear and whispered, “Gabe. I'm sorry we had a fight. I love our story, but it's time.” I wondered grumpily which kind of time she meant—mythic or historical. Though I knew, of course, she was right. And women, poor things, had that ticking clock, cruel taskmaster, inside them. “And Gabe,” she said, “if you get in trouble, ask Saint Margaret. You know where she is.”

“Saint Margaret,” I said. “God, we haven't been there in a while.”

Sarah shrugged. “I'm just saying. She helped me.” She turned the wedding ring around on her finger. It was slightly too big.

The van came, but she left most of her stuff behind. She left the makeshift fake fur sofa and the dusty pink dress with the torn lace on the living room wall. She left a coffee-stained cup on the kitchen table. She left one emerald-green high-heeled shoe. She left a half-empty box of sugar cubes in the refrigerator. She didn't, however, leave a thick, Sarah-sized, epic, devastating letter anywhere, addressed to me or anyone else. When she got into the van, next to the man who would drive her to Vermont to begin her life as Mrs. Priest, the puppet-maker's wife, she first set the accordion, wrapped in three blankets and tied with lots of twine, up front on the floor on her side. Maybe, I thought sourly, she'd play “Goodnight, Irene” for her children. Maybe they'd dance around the living room, build a castle out of sugar cubes in the dining room, pour food coloring over ice in the kitchen sink. Send me Christmas cards they'd made themselves, gluing eggshell Santas with cotton-ball beards to colored construction paper. I'd send something clever and tasteful, and too expensive, in return. I knew my part. She clambered in around the accordion and closed the door. She waved a little wave through the window.

After the van pulled away, I went back into her tilted house,
walked through the echoing, water-stained rooms one last time. I put the emerald-green high-heeled shoe on the top front step, arranging it carefully, jauntily, as if any minute she'd come running back, laughing, to slip the missing shoe on her bare foot. But the emerald-green shoe just sat there empty. I felt like the Prince with a runaway Cinderella. I closed Mrs. Wieznowski's rusty gate behind me. In my pocket I had a long piece of torn pink lace. I took it out and wound it around my fingers as I rode the subway back to Manhattan.

I looked at the faces of the people sitting opposite me. They seemed tired, worried. That Pound poem was on a placard above their heads, but the subway car didn't seem anything like a wet, black bough. It just seemed like a subway car. It rattled the way it always did. On the subway floor, something had spilled, turned grayish black, and gotten a newspaper page stuck to it. The half-page sports section of
The Hudson Times.
When I got home, I sat down in a kitchen chair. I still had my coat on. I pulled the length of dusty-rose lace across my palm, straightening its thready rows of tiny flowers.

I put the length of lace down on the kitchen table and went to Janos's. I waited in the downstairs living room until he came home from work. The fireplace was cold. The coffee table was swept clean. On it was a note from the maid:
Need more Bon Ami please and soft sponges thank you mr janos.
Feeling strange and hollow, I took Janos's enormous, regal fur hat, his ally against the impending winter, from its wrought-iron hook in the entryway and put it on. It clasped my head in its heavy embrace, still so warm it might have been breathing. The rich black fur tickled my ears and neck. Janos's head was bigger than mine, so the hat tilted, unable to get a solid footing. In the mirror, I was a surprisingly attenuated, pale figure, with sharp cheekbones, large eyes, my penumbral hair like a prisoner's, and the majestic black fur hat tumbling into my eyes.
Gabriel, at Janos's, on Sarah's wedding day.
Something bothered me. Something seemed to be missing. I moved closer to the mirror to try to see what it was, or where the missing thing should have been, but I couldn't make it out. Just my own blurry face. The big, ungainly hat tilting, uneasy as an ill-fitting crown, above it. Poor hat, I thought.